Among the possible attacks made by hackers to extract confidential data from a memory, for example, protected memory of a chip card, there are the attacks by fault injection (DFA or “Differential Fault Analysis”) that aim to disrupt the operation and/or the content of the memory, for example, by means of radiation (laser, infrared, X-rays, etc.).
It therefore may be particularly useful to be able to detect such an attack by fault injection. Once the attack is detected, there may be many approaches depending on the application for either blocking the component, preventing the sensitive data from being handed over, or reinitializing the component, etc.
For conventional memory architectures, for example, those of the bit-by-bit type, in which each stored bit can be read individually, there is a possibility of detecting such an attack based on a parity check on the bits read during a read operation. However, such an approach may not make it possible, in certain cases, to detect an attack by fault injection when the latter attack has actually taken place.